Earlier in the week, I wrote about the way that alternative history proponents have taken me to task for failing to be sufficiently polite and deferential to their position. So, I thought that it would be a useful exercise to turn over at least part of this review of Ancient Aliens S05E11 “The Viking Gods” to a serious examination of the intellectual underpinnings of the program’s ideas. Then I laughed because this is almost impossible to do. But I’ll give it a try anyway.

The conceit of this branch of the ancient astronaut hypothesis—as we must call it for, as its practitioners must recognize, it does not have falsifiable hypotheses that would rise to the level of theory, nor the confirmed tests to bolster such a theory—is that the ancient gods of the pre-Christian peoples of northern Europe were extraterrestrial beings. Specifically, the show’s talking heads assert that extraterrestrial beings by the names of Odin, Thor, and Freyr visited Scandinavia between 750 and 1100 CE and guided the migration and conquests of the Vikings. This poses several insuperable challenges. The first challenge is rather literal. In order to demonstrate that the Norse gods were extraterrestrials, ancient astronaut “theorists” (AATs) ask us to accept that the written sources we have for their actions, primarily the Poetic (Elder) Edda and the Prose (Younger) Edda, cited explicitly in the show, are accurate reports of the actions of the gods, with technology misunderstood as magic. In order to do so, AATs posit that such texts are accurate and can be accepted at face value. In so doing, however, this assumption produces an insurmountable contradiction. Snorri Sturluson, the author of the Prose Edda, writes in his preface to that work that the gods were not gods at all but regular human beings, and the mistaken assumption that mere men could be gods was caused by Zoroaster, who chose to be worshipped as Baal: “From him arose the error of idolatry; and when he was worshiped he was called Baal; we call him Bel; he also had many other names. But as the names increased in number, so was truth lost; and from this first error every following man worshiped his head-master, beasts or birds, the air and the heavenly bodies, and various lifeless things, until the error at length spread over the whole world.” Worse, Snorri said the Norse gods were not gods at all but earthly kings—of the Roman period:

And so much power accompanied these men for many ages after, that when Pompey, a Roman chieftain, harried in the east region, Odin fled out of Asia and hither to the north country, and then he gave to himself and his men their names, and said that Priamos had hight Odin and his queen Frigg, and from this the realm afterward took its name and was called Frigia where the burg stood. And whether Odin said 44 this of himself out of pride, or that it was wrought by the changing of tongues; nevertheless many wise men have regarded it a true saying, and for a long time after every man who was a great chieftain followed his example.

Snorri was being cute, I guess, in making Phrygia in Asia Minor the homeland of Frigg! By what criteria are AATs accepting certain facets of the Eddas as true but rejecting the contradictory aspects of them as false, if not the principle of convenience? A serious investigation of the Norse gods as aliens must explain and account for such discrepancies in a consistent way—not simply ignore or wish away a foundational flaw in the proposed idea. After all, if you wish to say Snorri was wrong in places because he was Christianizing and rationalizing myths, by what right can we assert he was right in other places without any other evidence in support of this? The second challenge is more theoretical, but it derives from a web of linguistic, iconographic, and comparative mythology facts that directly challenge the idea that the Norse gods were independent creatures who sprang into being at a fixed time, c. 750 CE. Let’s take the linguistic problem first. The Norse gods do not have extraterrestrial names, and in fact they share names with analogs in the Indo-European family of languages. Are we to consider the Norse Odin, the Germanic Wotan, the Old English Woden, the Old Saxon Wodan, and the Proto-Germanic Wodanaz the same alien or a different one in each time and place? If the latter, how are we to explain the presence of an identical one-eyed, bearded war monger in each place? If the former, we have another problem. If we are to concede that all the variants of Odin descend from one common source, we must therefore recognize that others among the Norse gods are not Norse at all. Among the gods was Týr, who is also called Teiws in Gothic, Tiw in Old English (hence Tuesday), and Ziu in Old High German. His name is cognate with Zeus among the Greeks, Jupiter (Iuppiter = (D)eus pater, or “Father Deus”) among the Romans, and Dyaus among the Vedic Indians. This Dyaus can be traced back to the dawn of Indo-European culture. So, if we can safely assume all of the Odins are one, then all of the versions of Zeus-Týr must also be one, in which case the ancient astronaut hypothesis fails to account for the “presence” of the same extraterrestrial beings in widely removed times and places, manifesting with different appearances and weaponry, unless, of course, special pleading argues that a very busy, nearly immortal alien (or set of aliens) ran about impersonating Zeus everywhere or that all the gods are remembrances of a singular alien encounter in the Indo-European heartland circa 4500 BCE. While this may be possible at a theoretical level, it is not the specific claim proposed by AATs, who have instead suggested that each culture’s gods were independent observations of aliens and can therefore be analyzed at the simplest level by taking ancient myths literally as events that occurred in the time and place stated in the myth or text. You might therefore reasonably propose that the same aliens showed up and called themselves by the same names in many places, though only in the Indo-European linguistic area. (Obviously, the aliens chose different names for Africa, Asia, and the Americas—because that’s how aliens roll.) That’s where the second and third problems come into play. Iconographic and comparative mythology evidence clearly show that the Indo-European pantheons are closely related and derive from an original, older source. To look just for a moment at Týr, we see that he sacrificed his right hand as a direct result of telling a necessary lie. The same story, including the necessary lie, appears among the Romans in the pseudo-historical myth of Scaevola (“Lefty”) and again among the Persians. Did the aliens simply take their own “ancient text” (Matthew 5:30) literally and lop off right hands at will whenever they fibbed? The similarities among Indo-European mythologies are so obvious and so pronounced that scholars have spent the better part of two centuries cataloging and analyzing them. Whole incidents from the Iliad can be found in the Mahabharata, and the same magic cauldrons can be found among the Celts and the Greeks. The sun is a wheel or a god driving a wheeled chariot wherever the Indo-European myths spread. Even the famous “Hamlet’s Mill” of alternative history fame can be found grinding away in both Scandinavia and India. In both detail and in structure and function, the Indo-European myths are very obviously related and can be traced to older sources. In my line of classic reprints, I republished Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folk-lore by Walter Keating Kelly, one of the best and most readable introductory guides to these similarities, all the more amazing for being 150 years old. So how are AATs to explain the clear and compelling evidence that these myths are related? There are only two ways: First, claim that the same aliens reenacted the same events over and over among every new people they found, but only within the Indo-European culture zone, adopting completely different methods and actions outside of this. Second, claim that all the events are memories of an original alien encounter c. 4500 BCE. Neither is particularly satisfying, though either could, theoretically, be defensible, so long as you are willing to employ special pleading about the nature of the aliens or abandon any claim that the aliens were in the Indo-European areas after 4500 BCE, when the various pantheons began to diverge. But that isn’t what Ancient Aliens claims. Instead, it simply ignores all of these epistemological problems and declares the Norse gods to be aliens with advanced technological weapons who were running the Viking’s battle plans from 750 CE to 1100 CE. I hope that this explanation of the intellectual foundation for my disapproval of the AATs incoherent and slipshod ideas about the Norse gods is sufficiently rigorous to justify the contempt I have for what follows. How much of the foregoing discussion do you think any of the AATs like Giorgio Tsoukalos, David Childress, Jason Martell, or William Henry are familiar with? Do you think any of them care about—or are even aware of—the actual scholarship on Indo-European mythology?

The Episode

The blue title card is back again in what is apparently the permanent new opening for the show. So, what do you think I should do to review Ancient Aliens’ claims that the Vikings had an “advanced” civilization that no one can explain without alien help? The Vikings lived in the early medieval period (750-1100 CE), and that’s a problem since the aliens apparently royally screwed over the peoples of the former Roman Empire, sending them into a spiral of warfare, poverty, and ignorance, while bequeathing boats to the Vikings. Did the aliens simply stop caring about the Mediterranean, or was it simply too hot and they needed a cooler climate to keep their cold fusion engines running? The narrator asks why the Norse “hieroglyphs” didn’t survive, which is hysterically funny since we all know from America Unearthed that the Norse used runes, not hieroglyphs, and we have hundreds of runic inscriptions from across Northern Europe. To be fair, very few deal with the gods, but this is no different from the case of the Mycenaean Greeks and Linear B. The show discusses Viking culture and its individualism, which is irrelevant to the alien encounter. It then describes Viking ventures to Eastern Europe, though the Scandinavian lecturer is wrong to state that the Vikings “invented ships,” which isn’t even true for Northern Europe. I presume this line was clipped from a longer and more accurate discussion. At any rate, the Vikings are praised for reaching Newfoundland—with nary a word about the Kensington Rune Stone or Henry Sinclair! Geologist Robert Schoch—whose area of specialization, we recall, is Sphinx weathering—pops up to describe how archaeological investigation at L’anse-aux-Meadows proved that the Norse actually came to America, unwittingly explaining why the ancient astronaut theory and America Unearth are wrong, wrong, wrong since no comparable evidence for aliens or a cult of medieval American Templar heretics has ever been found. I get that this is a tie-in episode to History’s Vikings drama series, but nearly ten minutes into the show, there isn’t any sign of aliens. Jason Martell, however, is baffled by how the Vikings could have built ships that actually work on water, and he claims that the Vikings are unlike any other culture of their time, which is a ridiculous lie since they merely developed forms well-known to the related Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, and related peoples, with whom they shared faith, art, and technology. Last week I insulted Martell by calling him dim, so this week let me be more specific: Martell claims to be an expert in “ancient Sumerian culture” despite never having studied it and admitting that he has never personally viewed a genuine Sumerian artifact. He states that he has derived his knowledge of Sumer from Zecharia Sitchin, the well known fabricator of false translations, and he claims that his “research” should be respected because he has “corresponded with top NASA scientists” about Nibiru. This only means that he sent an email and they wrote back to tell him he was wrong. Voila: Correspondence! Let me try to say this next bit politely, although it causes me pain. “Investigative mythologist” William Henry, who believes that, in a variation on Doctor Who, telephone booths are intergalactic wormhole gateways for Jesus, lies through his teeth claiming that the Greeks and Maya never ventured far from their homelands while Vikings went far and wide. The Maya traveled into the Caribbean, and the Greeks ventured as far afield as the Pillars of Hercules to the West and India to the East—where, I might add, they founded a kingdom longer-lasting than the Viking settlement at Newfoundland. The Egyptians, also cited by Henry as homebodies, similarly traveled down the east coast of Africa. He leaves out the Phoenicians, who may well have reached Britain, and the Carthaginians, who traveled to sub-Saharan Africa. In sum, William Henry knows not whereof he speaks, and the established facts of archaeology demonstrate that he makes things up. After the first commercial, we hear that a Viking raid on an English monastery in 793 occurred during a storm, and AATs claim that this was alien doing. This leads to a discussion of the gods, which Karl E. H. Seigfried shows up to explicate. I thought that Seigfried was a credentialed scholar of Norse myth, but as it happens he’s actually a jazz musician with an undergraduate degree in literature and a doctorate in double bass performance. He teaches a course on Norse mythology at a private Lutheran college and blogs about Norse mythology online. The narrator explains that our knowledge of the Norse gods comes from the Eddas, but Giorgio Tsoukalos—who I will remind you is a qualified expert only in bodybuilding promotion and sports communication—doesn’t think much beyond taking it literally, referring to “the Norse” rather than Snorri in referencing material from his text. It’s dishonest of the show to depict the “nine realms” of Norse myth as spherical planets when they were considered superimposed planes connected by a world tree, just like every other traditional cosmos. The producers induce bias into the discussion by making the nine realms into a model of our solar system when the ancient texts and depictions show no such thing. Overall, though, I am surprised that so much of this episode is given over to non-AAT scholars presenting actual material about the gods. Of course AATs pop up to spin this material, but this is much less wacky than usual episodes. Odin’s two ravens, who spy on all the events of the earth, are likened to Obama’s drone program by David Childress, whose credentials for discussing this are (a) his lies about being an archaeologist, (b) his serial self-plagiarism, and (c) his admission to stealing other people’s work without acknowledgement, permission, or payment. Philip Coppens, whose is still dead, questions whether the Norse, in calling the ravens birds, really meant what they said—thought this, of course, undercuts the very essence of taking texts literally. Odin’s high throne, from which he observes the cosmos, is likened again to “advanced extraterrestrial technology,” with Jason Martell suggesting it’s a “captain’s chair in a spaceship above the earth,” though one might note that actual astronauts in spaceships can see absolutely nothing on the earth below at the human level (not even the Great Wall of China) because it is too small, negating the literal reading of this text as a spaceship since this reading prevents us from accepting any part of the text as true except that Odin could sit in a chair. Thor is called to service next, with his goat-drawn chariot taken for a UFO. I’m not sure, though, why they left out the fact that Thor eats his goats each night and resurrects their corpses each day, as Snorri describes. Is this not technological enough for them? His goat feast is not discussed, but instead Thor’s magic belt is claimed by Philip Coppens and Jason Martell to be an exoskeleton, though once again the text itself belies the claim since the belt quite literally has nothing whatsoever to do with covering his arms or legs. It is a belt, and it goes around his waist. How do we know this? Here’s the whole of it, from Snorri: “The second treasure he possesses is Megingjarder (belt of strength); when he girds himself with it his strength is doubled.” That’s it, the entire reference to it in Norse myth. The utter childishness of these claims—and the childlike glee with which they are put forward—makes me sad. After the next commercial we talk about the prosperity god Freyr and the giant Loki, again summarizing the standard mythology with the help of several conventional experts. We hear about a magic ship, Skíðblaðnir, that folds up small enough to fit in one’s pocket, which I would easily view as a folktale motif, but Ancient Aliens doesn’t even bother to claim this is a technological wonder but rather a spaceship observed growing smaller as it vanished into the sky. Sigh. This wasn’t even worth the trouble of describing. As you can see from Snorri, a literal reading of the text would suggest something different than a spaceship:

Skidbladner is the best of ships, and is made with the finest workmanship; but Naglfare, which is in Muspel, is the largest. Some dwarfs, the sons of Ivalde, made Skidbladner and gave it to Frey. It is so large that all the asas, with their weapons and war-gear, can find room on board it, and as soon as the sails are hoisted it has fair wind, no matter whither it is going. When it is not wanted for a voyage, it is made of so many pieces and with so much skill, that Frey can fold it together like a napkin and carry it in his pocket.

Now how many spaceships have sails? David Childress describes the Norse dwarf craftsmen, the sons of Ivaldi, who forged the gods’ weapons, as alien beings but they are exactly equivalent to Vulcan, Hephaestus, and the Cabiri—part of a well-known system of mythologizing blacksmiths as supernatural Others due to their seemingly miraculous power of turning lumps of metal into objects. This is found across the Old World, often with reference to dwarves (possibly related to the lameness, stooped posture, and mutilations associated with blacksmiths), but Childress and Coppens simply declare them the Grey aliens, who somehow sit around forging weapons with hammers and anvils despite venturing across time and space to reach Earth. Norse dwarves, or Dvergr, were only described as small in the thirteenth century CE, a thousand years too late to be relevant. The only Scandinavian texts the show cites, the Eddas, clearly describe the Dvergr as of human size (Gylfaginning 14 and Reginsmál 1). (The only other text cited in the hour, by Adam of Bremen, seems to have been researched from its appearance on Odin’s Wikipedia page.) Worse, the texts clearly state that these are not space creatures but beings that live “in earth and in stone.” It is only in the High Middle Ages, when the Dvergr become literary characters, that they merge with tales of fairies and Little People to take on small stature. Following this, we hear the idea that the Rainbow Bridge to Asgard (Bifrost) was somehow a wormhole to another planet. But Snorri makes clear that it is a structure, not a hole: “It has three colors, is very strong, and is made with more craft and skill than other structures.” I think it’s fairly obvious that many ancient people—primarily Indo-European, but also the Japanese and Siberian shamans—thought of rainbows as a bridge to heaven. The Greeks thought of rainbows as the path that the divine messenger Iris used to travel down to the earth, and even in the Bible God uses a rainbow as the sign of His covenant linking Him to Noah and humankind below (Genesis 9:13). A glance at a rainbow in the sky, arching up high into the sky, is sufficient to explain this image without reference to invisible wormholes. After the next commercial we talk about Odin’s magic spear, Gungnir, which Snorri says “never misses its mark.” A magic spear that hits its target need not be explained as a “Cruise missile” as Childress claims, nor is it necessary to call it “advanced weaponry” as Coppens suggests. Instead it is wish-fulfillment: a spear that does what every hunter hopes—hits its target every time. Just as the gods always impregnate women with every sexual encounter, so too must they hit every target when they throw their spears. I suppose it could be a “smart bomb” (though it never explodes—and in fact awaits the end of time to be used), but it’s stretching it to suggest that people who relied heavily on hunting were incapable of imagining hunting magic. Similarly, Thor’s hammer Mjölnir is claimed to be a kinetic weapon capable of destroying mountains. Philip Coppens really doesn’t think much of poetic imagery. The name actually is cognate to several Indo-European words related to lightning, hammers, and mills. It is the symbol of Thor’s command of lightning and thunder, and it is related to Hamlet’s Mill, the great churning of the heavens that moves the stars through the sky and sends bolts of lightning to the earth. Thor’s lightning was said to impregnate the rowan (mountain-ash) with power, making their branches into divining rods. Would Tsoukalos like to explain how using tree branches to find underground metal is “really” an alien plan to put nanobots in the tree branches to turn them into high tech metal detectors? By what right does Tsoukalos propose that we accept the claim that Thor’s hammer is an alien weapon on the strength of a myth while rejecting Thor’s magic wish-giving tree branches? After the final break, Jason Martell tries to tell us that the Vikings buried their dead in boats because they were “conveyances” to the stars, i.e. spaceships. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that the Vikings used ships in life and therefore honored the dead with the tools they used in life. Today the Chinese—also cited as using boats to send souls to space—burn cardboard representations of cars, houses, and money to supply the dead with the things they need for the afterlife. Surely the Viking ship burials are no less symbolic. Tsoukalos, having read too many Marvel comics, suggests that Valhalla—Odin’s hall—is a space station, and Martell agrees by suggesting that the hall is a “ship” and “metallic.” I imagine he thinks that the descriptions of the gold and precious metals that line the hall—wealth—is somehow connected to being made of metal. I’m not sure how they imagine that a space station has 540 doors, as Valhalla does. Worse, Snorri makes plain that Valhalla stands in the shade of a large tree on which a goat feeds: “A she-goat, by name Heidrun, stands up in Valhal and bites the leaves off the branches of that famous tree called Lerad. From her teats runs so much mead that she fills every day a vessel in the hall from which the horns are filled, and which is so large that all the einherjes get all the drink they want out of it.” A hart stands over Valhalla, also eating the tree, and from his antlers drip the waters that form earth’s great rivers. How do we square this with a space station? Last I checked, space stations don’t squirt enough water to fill all earth’s rivers. I am surprised that the show left out the Valkyries. Surely having women descending from the sky in their chariots to abduct the souls of dead warriors and ferry them into the sky is a closer analog to alien abduction than what Tsoukalos claims—that burning ship burials were meant to replicate the afterburners of rocket ships, a patently ridiculous claim leftover from the Apollo era. I thought aliens used anti-gravity and wormholes—consistency, people! Coppens suggests that the Vikings traveled across the oceans in hope of finding the gods, another impossibility since we know from votive offerings and inscriptions that the believers in the cult of Thor felt he was immanent and always with them. Tsoukalos concludes the hour by saying that the Viking gods “direct[ed] our history” in the Middle Ages by purposely leading the Vikings around Europe raping and pillaging. The aliens really have a thing for sexual misconduct, whether it be encouraging rape, impregnating women, or sodomizing abductees. But anyway, no one explains why the aliens stopped talking to the Franks, the Romans (Byzantines), the Muslims, and anyone else capable of producing written records. Surely the appearance of alien space ships and powerful aliens wielding kinetic weapons, Cruise missiles, and spy drones should have attracted the attention of an Adam of Bremen, a Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, etc. But those pesky aliens always manage to stay just a few steps away from anyone with quill and parchment, preferring to expose themselves only to people without literature, to be remembered only centuries later, in obscure stories.

It's magic. No, I don't have anyone working with me. I do it all myself, though it helps to have a good working knowledge of ancient mythology.

The reference to the "American Templar heretics" refers to America Unearthed and Scott Wolter's imaginary group of medieval Templars living in America and worshipping a goddess in the Newport Tower. The sentence before listed both Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed, and the parallel structure required a counterpoint to the aliens to match up with America Unearthed.

Reply

Gunn

4/13/2013 07:57:10 am

Thanks for the clarification. You see that I dropped the Sinclair off my pen-name, and I'm ready to concede much about the Templar connection to the Kensington Runestone...that it is merely possible and not probable for there to be a connection.

However, one clarity still rings true in my shifting paradigm about the "stone document": It's plastered with Christian symbology, so because of this and the date, it's definately not pagan, or Viking.

In essence, it now looks to me like Swedish and other Scandinavian Christians (Northmen?) penetrated inland to MN in 1362, and likely without any Templar connection...but there is still the possibilty of Templars or Cistercians being involved in some way with this medieval exploration and attempted taking up of land.

I'm trying to sort through what's real and what isn't, but in the end it's still speculation except for what's true...and even that seems to be a guess a times.

Tara Jordan

4/14/2013 12:54:09 am

Gunn,I`d hate to break your heart,but there is not a single historical document that mentions the Knight Templars journey to "America".I don't understand the fascination that Americans have for the Knight Templars. There is nothing remotely exceptional about them.Merely another Order or Confrerie de moines soldats.Most of the hype about them,is built on loony alternative history, the byproduct of pseudo scholars, who more than often never went through the archives,& don't even speak the language (French).The Knight Templars frenzy originated in Europe in the 80`s, you guys are jumping on the bandwagon,30 years too late....

Reply

Gunn

4/14/2013 03:49:36 am

Hi Tara. I just got an image of Rodney Dangerfield adjusting his tie. Let me explain.

Honestly, my heart is not broken to have to shift my paradigm away from the Templars. In fact, my wife would like to never hear the word again, I'm sure! And the other day, a report came home about my ten-year-old grandson rather offensively disagreeing with a teacher about, of all things, Christopher Columbus. I wonder where that came from?

The first book that got me into this Templar business was Wolter's X book. I bought it about three years ago when I went to visit the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, MN, the first time...coincidentally on my thirtieth wedding anniversary. It was the result of reading Wolter's book that I first received the notion of Templars being connected to the KRS.

It made pretty good sense to me at the time, especially the part explaining why the runestone would be found located very near the center of North America. This seeming exactitude made some sense if one considered that monks like the Cistercians were bugs for exactitude, sacred geometry, etc. This would explain why the runestone was both placed and later discovered out in the absolute middle of nowhere.

Tara, I am what one may call a KRS purist, in that I take the message for exactly what it says. From reading Wolter's book one would be led to believe that the hooked X's are a direct connection to the Knights Templar. Not we see that other Christians besides Templars would have used this X symbol for Christ, and the hooked X as the symbol for In Christ.

This is where the other hooked X's on the East Coast come in, along with Henry Sinclair. Based on the earlier assumptions, the Sinclair business was easy to assume, too, and it made a lot of sense, especially when considering all the Native American elements. Much of this has now been disputed (on these blogs) and it looks more like innocent speculation (if one may say so) than history truth...as far as proof goes.

But, this is not to say that the Templars absolutely had nothing to do with the KRS, or that a man named Henry Sinclair positively did not visit Vinland. These speculations are still open in my mind, though greatly diminished.

1362 really is not that distant from the official breakup of the Templars, and because of their previous power and wealth, it's not that difficult to imagine their interest in beginning a new nation, but starting from the heart of the continent rather than the nearest shore.

The Templars were very exceptional, Tara, as Christian warriors. We have Christian warriors in the US military even today. Though the Templars, in their best form, were willing to die for honor, they were clear in their motto about God receiving any and all glory. They came from all over Western Europe, not just France.

Everything still looks very medieval and Scandinavian up here to me, so my heart is nowhere near being broken. The Kensington Runestone is genuine, and I'm genuinely happy with my ever-shifting, truth-seeking paradigm. Now, if only this snow will go away!

Tara Jordan

4/14/2013 08:19:53 am

Gunn.To be honest,I am not very familiar (& really not interested) with the diffusionist literature.I consider it to be essentially an "American thing".I`m slightly acquainted with the Templars issue, because I collaborated in translating a truckload of original documents about Jacques de Molay,for a friend who wrote a paper for Open Edition-Revues Org Academic Journals.
If you really want to switch to a new paradigm & get involved in genuine academic studies,while dealing with fascinating "real life" characters, I`d respectfully recommend you to study the lives of Baron Ungern Von Sternberg,Alexander Kolchak & Grigory Semyonov.(I wrote my Master thesis on Ungern Von Sternberg & I`m totally under his spell ).

Reply

Gunn

4/14/2013 11:38:32 am

Thanks for the names to look up.

If one considers the KRS to be genuine, and many serious, intelligent people believe it is, then ten "real life" Scandinavian characters were killed while exploring medieval MN. This is life and death, in reality, not merely fascinating, imagined trivia.

If you cannot dig deeply enough to discover for yourself that the KRS is authentic, then I have no basis of discussion with you, because we will believe one another is short-sighted and get nowhere.

My belief system about the KRS is based on an immense amount of evidence right up here in MN, which I certainly won't go into again. All of this collective evidence, and the runestone, didn't pop up out of nowhere. They are real, most of it, and it corroborates the KRS. True, right now it's mostly in the arena of speculation, but the speculation is at least based on actual, accumulated evidence, whether people want to believe it or not.

Time may tell. Peace to you, Sister.

The Other J.

4/13/2013 08:22:21 am

That was brilliant. I've only watched the first ten minutes of that episode; and it'll be the third episode of AA I've ever watched, and I don't know if I need to watch any more of it, because the claims just make me lose enamel on my molars. Among AAT's and alternative historians, there seems to be a pathological need to deny human agency and any ability to develop or use any technology on their own. That usually gets reiterated in a statement like 'We're supposed to believe we just walked out of caves and started building the pyramids?' No, we're supposed to believe we walked out of caves and tens of thousands of years and multiple civilizations later we started building the pyramids.

I'm new to your blog via America Unearthed, and didn't know about the line of books you referenced (Walter Keating Kelly above). I'm fascinated by that sort of thing and will have to check those out.

The first passage from Snorri Sturluson that you cite, the one with Phrygia, is the same one the Azerbaijani/Heyerdahl group used in the aborted work they were doing based on Viking ship-like petroglyphs in Azerbaijan (Phrygia/Frigg, Lake Van/Vanir, Azer/Aesir). I think from the last comment I posted about that study that people assumed I was promoting the idea. Not the case -- I only asked if you were familiar with it and if the work persisted at all after Heyerdahl's death. But I am interested in the ways the IE myths diverged and spread; the Kelly book looks like a good start. Is it similar to what the Brothers Grimm did with language, tracking the development of Proto-Indo-European words via a kind of tree-like structure showing where branches connect?

One more question: Does your anthropology background knowledge extend into Indian-Chinese connections? You note the Greeks in India, and I've been toying with an idea for a while now that starts with that.

If you use the "Books" menu at the top of the page, you'll see a list of my own books as well as a Classic Reprints page with a catalog of my reprint books. Both "Indo-European Tradition" and Edwin Sidney Hartland's "Legend of Perseus" are great for comparative mythology.

Keating's book is actually based on Grimm and Adalbert Kuhn. It was the first English language book to report the discoveries of German mytholography in England, and Keating tried to supplement their work with British examples. For its age, it's a remarkably accurate text with great information about the dead, werewolves, witches, etc. It isn't particularly rigorous like Grimm but takes a more holisitic approach, examining various myth topics.

I'm not particularly familiar with Indian-Chinese connections, though there is of course obvious influence from Buddhism and other Indian myths and philosophies in Chinese culture.

Reply

The Other J.

4/13/2013 10:56:20 am

Thanks for the info. That sounds like all kinds of fun.

As for India-China connections, I'm mainly interested one specific thing -- tracking the development of a fighting/grappling style from India to China, and how it spread to Japan. (I wrestled into college and did judo in grad school, and wrote about wrestling in Beowulf for a graduate seminar on poem.)

I know that in the 5th century a Buddhist monk named Bodhidharma established the Shaolin Temple in China; from there the Chinese fighting style spread, and was adopted in Japan, where it was altered and adapted by the samurai. They needed a hand-to-hand combat style that was more effective with armor (strikes don't work well against the armored), and out of that jujitsu developed. But many of those techniques aren't new; they're attested to in ancient Egypt, Sumeria and Greece, and as far as I know, no military force incorporated such techniques as effectively as Alexander's troops did with pankration.

So I've wondered how much of an influence Alexander's troops in India had on what Bodhidharma took to China, and by proxy what eventually made it to Japan. Alexander's soldiers were all trained in pankration, and it seems likely that if they settled in India (as they did), their fighting style would have been absorbed into the local hand-to-hand combat forms (India has its own ancient tradition of wrestling). If so, could it have been that hybrid form that was exported to China by Bodhidharma, and could that be partly why there are so many similarities in techniques across the ages and cultures -- because there was a steady cross-cultural transmission that can be traced.

I understand there are only so many ways a body can move and so many things a body can do, so it's completely possible for similar techniques to sprout up independently of each other. (This happens among isolated tribes in the Amazon. Hell, even orangutans shoot single leg takedowns on each other like how kids are taught.) But knowing that Alexander's troops were trained in pankration (which was also competed in the ancient Olympics), and knowing that Bodhidharma was from the same region in the northern India borderlands and left to found the Shaolin temple, some kind of cross-cultural influence seemed possible.

Note: I'm NOT saying it was exported from Greece to the east in some colonial fashion; I'm saying it was absorbed, adapted and altered as seen fit by whoever was practicing at the time, and that the transmission went both ways. But the underlying reason for the entire argument stems from some debates about globalization (and here I'm having a grad school flashback). There's a history professor at Cornell, Walter Lafeber, who wrote a book about Michael Jordan, basketball and globalization. It's not bad, but it's sort of hazy on the boundaries between what globalization is as opposed to a straight-out cultural export made popular through commercial marketing. Other arguments about globalization suggest more than a one-way street for cultural transmission, and if you want to use sport as a model, it seems to me the history of wrestling is a far better model, well beyond the (possible) pankration-Shaolin-samurai lineage. Today, with mixed martial arts, there's a constant flow of information and adaptation from culture to culture around the globe; from east to west, southern hemisphere to northern, and back again, in a constant feedback loop. There are even jujitsu and judo techniques being adapted into collegiate wrestling and vice versa. It just seems to me if you want to use a sport as a theoretical model to explain the mechanisms of globalization, wrestling is a better model than the one-way export of an American sport, it's chief American shoe company, and it's icon.

That's a fascinating idea, and one that sadly I know nothing at all about. It certainly sounds plausible.

Christopher Randolph

4/14/2013 04:08:08 pm

An overarching theme of all manner of 'alternative' historians is that regular people "can't" and "couldn't" do things. They always start from how what absolutely happened "could not have" and work from there. Most of these people have had disappointing (or no) professional or academic careers and they seem to project negativity outward toward people who managed to accomplish things.

People (especially non-whites) "could not" build buildings or make even modest scientific advances, Arabs "could not" fly a plane already in the air even after taking lessons, Lee Harvey Oswald "could not" shoot a slowly moving target with a rifle despite his Marine Corps training.

Simultaneously the conspiracies are hatched by demi-gods who have all of the power, whether government spies who must make James Bond look like a punter, or aliens who might as well be gods. There are pawns/victims and Uebermenschen and nothing in between.

The psychological and sociological profiles of the people who create and believe this stuff are not healthy.

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Paul Cargile

4/13/2013 08:56:02 am

These guys have to know they are selling Snake Oil. I looked at William Henry's website and find it near impossible to believe that a grown man actually believes there are connections between wormholes and Egyptian boats, old telephone booths, temple entrances or alcoves, and phone handsets.

Is this somehow or somewhat related to theosophy and the strong desire or attaining the next level in human evolution/enlightenment?

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The Other J.

4/13/2013 09:34:05 am

Stargates!

Seriously, go deep enough into what Henry and some of his confederates discuss, and they get to the point where they argue films like Stargate and Stanley Kubrick's work and The X-Files were all propaganda by the extraterrestrials to introduce the subject to the population and prime them for their eventual return. In other words, they take fiction for fact.

They see the films/tv shows, take a step back and assume the premises are true, and then re-interpret the films/tv shows as encoded messages that are "trying to tell us something." That's the kind of non-specific language used, "trying to tell us something." It's as if mythology for them started in the 1970's, and anything prior to that must have been seeded back in history by some baffling higher intelligence.

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Gunn

4/13/2013 10:21:41 am

"...propaganda by the extraterrestrials..."

Indeed, communicating with the aliens (spirits).

I've heard of channeling, and I've also heard about automatic writing, and I've also heard about Ouija boards being hooked up for automatic writing. I'm not sure what to think, but it seems that much of this outlandish information may be coming more or less directly from demon spirits, if one believes in such a possibility. So then, if this is the case, are we being prepared for deception?

Again, Jason unwittingly to the rescue on a Godly mission of debunkery against demon-inspired propaganda...I wish him God-speed!

Varika

4/14/2013 04:55:59 pm

Gunn--I experimented with automatic writing in my late teens. After a little while, I noticed a pattern in what I was "writing." It pretty closely followed the things I had recently seen/read/been worried about, especially once you started recognizing the symbolism within the various "stories" that were coming out. Symbolism, incidentally, that was peculiar to me, in a lot of cases. (Just as an example, a school bus was always symbolic of not wanting to be/go wherever the school bus was.)

All automatic writing is, is letting your subconscious spew without bothering to edit. It can be a valuable tool for a fiction writer, but taking it seriously as communication outside one's own mind is...questionable at best.

Gunn

4/15/2013 02:42:10 am

Varika, communication outside one's own mind is what all these many people are supposedly attesting to, along with all manner of "spiritual" believers everywhere of all religious faiths. Since so many faiths include the notion of communicating outside one's own mind with perceived entities in a benevolent way, it is an easy roll-over to also believe in communications with entities in a "bad" way.

Of course the scientific world is evidence-driven and so communicating with any beings outside one's own head is frowned upon. I guess the only measurement I can think of is the collective assertions being made by all these authors, who are claiming that their information came directly from unseen entities outside their own heads.

Can something be real even if its not seen? How about the possibility of spiritual deception that can contrast with spiritual truth? Are "good and evil" being represented by entities in places we can't normally see or venture into? Can we venture into these areas?

Many faiths claim they can communicate with God, so it shouldn't be surprising that many alternative theorists would claim they can communicate with spirit beings, too. What are we to think, then? Is all this communicating fake, or all of it real, or halfway between? More importantly, is there such a thing as "good" communications and "bad" communications?

Most faiths insist that it is a bad idea to conjure up spirits who may misguide. This is the definition of "occult," which is seeing or learning something that is supposed to be hidden. This is the proverbial Pandora's Box to be left alone.

I know, this becomes very esoteric and enigmatic...and also very unscientific.

The Other J.

4/15/2013 01:00:33 pm

Varika -

I wrote a paper in grad school on William Butler Yeats and the spirit guide (Leo Africanus) who communicated to Yeats through his wife's automatic writing. Yeats spent about 11 years in regular contact with Leo through seances and his wife's automatic writing.

The short of it is, you're not wrong. In the Yeats case, it even affected those around him who were facilitating his contact with Leo Africanus. Turned out Yeats had some poems published in a magazine just a few pages apart from some of the very first English translations of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, where Nietzsche discusses his version of the superman. This intrigued Yeats, and he then received one of the first bound English translations of Nietzsche's work.

At the same time Yeats was part of the Golden Dawn, a occult fraternity who held regular seances. They noticed Yeats' interest in Nietzsche's work, as well as one of the poetic images Nietzsche uses for the overman is the lion. Nietzsche also lists some historical figures that he felt achieved the status of the overman -- people like Caesar, Jesus, Socrates, Shakespeare, and Leonardo da Vinci. Yeats had taken an interest in these people because Nietzsche had tagged them as overmen.

At the time, the Golden Dawn had an encyclopedia in their library of influential people they studied. Right above the entry for Leonardo da Vinci in their edition was Leo Africanus, a real historical figure from North Africa who became an advisor to Rome. The name 'Leo Africanus,' of course, is also 'African lion,' the same poetic image Nietzsche uses in Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Not long after, the spirit of Leo Africanus first contacted Yeats during a Golden Dawn seance; Yeats didn't ask for Leo -- Leo came to Yeats via the medium. That started the 11-year relationship, which continued through his wife Georgie's automatic writing. Leo presented himself to Yeats through the medium as Yeats' spirit guide and opposite, and instructed Yeats that if the poet was to become a complete person (like the Nietzschean overman), he needed to embrace his oppositions -- which Leo Africanus embodied. Leo was Yeats' key to becoming an overman.

Put those pieces together: Yeats first sees an early Nietzsche translation in a magazine in which Yeats was also published; Yeats develops an interest in Nietzsche and the overman figures, which is noticed by the Golden Dawn; in their encyclopedia, one of the overman figures, Leonardo da Vinci, is just below the entry for Leo Africanus, whose name also evokes Nietzsche's poetic image for the overman. The next step wasn't hard -- the channeling of the person with the poetically-evocative name for the poet. Yeats swallowed it.

But Yeats had earlier developed an unhealthy obsession with an Irish actress and revolutionary, Maude Gonne. She encouraged Yeats' nationalistic poetry, which Yeats mistook for a more romantic interest; he had proposed to Gonne (repeatedly) and was turned down (repeatedly). He later married Georgie Hyde-Lees, but still burned a torch for Gonne, which he later (creepily) transferred to her daughter, Iseult.

Georgie discovered that she had a talent for automatic writing, and that the more Leo Africanus spoke to Yeats through her writing, the more Yeats focused on her and the less his eyes strayed to his past crush's 21-year-old daughter.

Yeats was a writer of tremendous national importance to Ireland, and some of his most important work was produced during that 11-year stint with Leo Africanus as Yeats tried to write himself into a kind of artistic overman. But the topics Yeats and Leo discussed, and the framework within which Leo arose, can be traced back to Yeats' initial fascination with Nietzsche and the concept of the overman; the Golden Dawn's recognition of this and facilitation of Yeats' spirit guide encounter through channeling Leo Africanus (the African lion); and Georgie's recognition that her channeling Leo through her automatic writing both kept her husband's attention on her and very probably helped him become a better writer. It was a psychodrama, one that produced results, but one with very earthly foundations, not supernatural.

From that study, I came to the conclusion that automatic writing was just that, a psychodrama. That may be useful for personal development, but it can also be disappointing if it's taken for being anything more or less than a practice of exploring one's own subconscious.

Gunn

4/15/2013 02:51:32 pm

Edgar Cayce comes to mind. He is an interesting study because he seems to have mysteriously crossed this "no-go" line between scientific reality (actual healings) and the spiritual realm...while also crossing the no-go line between perceived good and bad communications with the "spiritual world"--apparently initiated through hypnosis. (A good lesson for Sirhan Sirhan.)

A quick study of Cayce's life reveals that he was very conflicted about his "gift." On the one hand, he had the ability to do good, yet there were these seemingly occult-like influences and associations that bothered him.

This reveals the conundrum involved with the occult: much of the information received can be accurate and even creative...but it is the "small" amount of deception that can do the harm. One might say that Cayce opened the forbidden Pandora's Box, little by little, thinking he was doing good, until he ended up leading many of his followers down a path of nonsense, including reincarnation and Atlantis and other decidedly unacceptable theories.

So, in essence, the information coming through him was not from his own mind, and he was deceived. Good intentions, bad outcome.

Think of it as a spiritual bait and switch.

This is how it may be with UFO's and aliens. A bait and switch, from one realm (spiritual) to another (our physical world)...purposeful illusions and distortions with a goal in mind: deception.

Jason, keep fighting the good fight!

L.S

6/16/2013 09:39:29 am

The Other J.,
I have a friend who does serious academic research on the followers of David Icke among other things and Icke has apparently stated that films like Pixar's "Monsters Inc." were made by the Reptilian people. It has something to do with the Monsters harvesting fear or something like that!

Jim

4/14/2013 06:41:57 am

Jason wrote "Now how many spaceships have sails?"

Granted, this is a rhetorical question, but solar sails are a viable method of interstellar locomotion and have numerous advantages over other methods, namely, you don't need to carry/produce the energy required to move your ship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail.

I'm actually surprised that AA hasn't claimed that earth bound sailors were taught hoe to sail the oceans by ancient aliens who used solar sails to fly their spaceships.

I actually did think about the solar sails when I wrote that, but you wouldn't unfurl your solar sail in the atmosphere where the Vikings could see it!

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Jim

4/14/2013 10:59:33 am

That would be a very bad idea... at least with the solar sail materials we currently have.

Maybe the ancient aliens had better materials that could also be used in the atmosphere, and their space ships doubled as sail boats... it's starting to make sense now! It was all built with nano-engineered materials that were stronger than steel but only one molecule thick, allowing them to fold their spaceship/sailboat hybrid into a tiny pocket-sized package. I think I'm becoming a believer!

Michael O'Connor

4/14/2013 12:49:25 pm

I can't watch Ancient Astronauts. It makes my brain hurt.

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Leslie

10/20/2013 06:43:32 pm

Maybe the Giorgio and the others look the Thor movie and he's believe this is not film, this is the real story!. Haha!

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Brian F

10/28/2013 02:16:56 pm

It is amazing how these AAT nutjobs will go to prove their theories are correct.

Norse mythology is one of the most common source material for most fiction, but to say that the Norse didn't have many books or scrolls takes a whole load of guts; they left runestones all over Scandinavia! (I know of the Kensington Runestone, but that one has to be ruled out because it is unlike other runestones, which mark boundaries or the deathplace of a figure)

Even still, I have to give several of the experts telling the truth in the myths; Loki is not a god but a giant and that the dwarves (Sons of Ivaldi) forged many of the gods' weapons. I have to give them credit and agree on their opening number. However, trying to place Odin's Raven as a Predator-style unmanned aerial vehicle is making them look even worse.

Applying modern analogies to long ancient stories is like me telling my son that the sun is not the sun; it is a giant light-bulb fueled by the gods of the ancient past.

"Obviously, the aliens chose different names for Africa, Asia, and the Americas—because that’s how aliens roll." Sentence of the week.

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CHF01

8/19/2014 07:36:23 am

This episode is WAAAAAY to speculative. There's just not enough solid historical information about the Vikings, meaning it leaves 3/4 of the program devoted to crazy AA theories. I can handle the AA theories in small doses, but this episode was over the top with strange ideas. Valhalla a space station? Almost as good as Giorgio's statement in his latest series that the Loch Ness is an alien craft.

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.